Find Me by Andre Aciman
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book):
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.
In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.
Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
MY OPINION: **
I tried really really hard to like this book. I enjoyed the first one and rated it a solid four stars. But somehow, this one just didn't hit the same and instead was boring and unenjoyable.
This is not unusual judging from the other reviews I have read. I think after CMBYN we all have such high expectations for a sequel to an amazing book but this one fell quite short from what I was waiting for.
The book is set decades after the first one with everyone living their own lives. It's divided into four parts and I'm going to go into my separate thoughts on each individual part.
1. Samuel and Miranda. The first part is all about Elio's father, Sami, and a woman he meets on the train, Miranda. I must say that this was my least favorite part. Besides the fact that I simply did not care in the slightest about Elio's DAD, it was quite unnerving to read. Samuel felt so out of character and I could not imagine the wise old man from the first book being the same person as this man. The relationship between Miranda and Samuel was even worse. Miranda is decades younger than him which wasn't the big problem but it was the way that they suddenly fell in love. I felt no chemistry, no sparks, nothing. I'm honestly confused as to how they even got together. Samuel was kinda creepy, to be quite honest, as he talked about wanting to kiss and do things to this young woman that he just met. Um. It was a bit strange. This was just not the best part. Within like twelve hours, they're making love, getting tattoos, and talking about having a family together and I was like um what. Overall, this section was just not for me. I understand why it's the most talked about section that deters people from reading this book. --> 1 star
2. Elio meets an older man named Michel who he begins to have a little fling with. They were cute and all but obviously it was never going to work out in the long run because Elio's heart still belonged to Oliver and always will. I actually liked this section of the book for the most part because it showed how hard it was for Elio to let in other people that weren't Oliver and how important it was for him to have this relationship and realize that he still needed Oliver in the end. The biggest problem for me was the age gap again because I feel like Aciman has a weird thing with them and it's always included in his books. It felt unnecessary at this point because they were having the exact same conversations just in different words (the "I'm too old for you" and the "No, you're not, I love you" type of thing). --> 3 stars
3. This section was told from Oliver's perspective. I found this interesting because it's something we did not get to see at all in the first book. Oliver has a wife and children but one day hears a Bach piece and is suddenly transported back in time to his memories of Elio and everything that happened in CMBYN. Oliver has a few passages about wanting to be with both a man and a woman at the same time which felt a little creepy with the way he was talking about these people that we don't know as they're not fully developed characters. --> 2 stars
4. FINALLY. Elio and Oliver are reunited. But I was SO disappointed. We were not fed. We are not satisfied with the FLIMSY amount of FLUFF that we get about them. I want to know what happened. Did they get married? What happened? How does Little Ollie play in to their love story? No. It was like 10 pages (I was reading on a Kindle so I'm estimating) of nothing. We needed more than that. We deserved more than that especially because I'm 99.9% sure that they're the main reason why people read this book. I would have appreciated more about them and less about Samuel. --> 2 stars.
OTHER THOUGHTS:
I wish we could have seen more of a character development with Elio from the first book to this one. In the first one, he's seventeen, and in this one, he's around thirty-two, I believe, and yet I felt no change. If we didn't know that it's the future, I would have assumed he was still the naive, innocent, seventeen-year-old boy. I would have liked to have seen some clear maturing in him or at least something to differentiate him from his past teenage self. I sincerely hope that in the future, I am wiser and better than the person that I am now..
I hated the relationships in this book. There, I said it. SOMEHOW everyone is falling in love with each other just by looking once. Someone tell me how that works because it would be such a handy tip for the future. Like, seriously, suddenly Samuel's in love with Miranda after one conversation with her on a train about literally nothing. I was so disappointed because these relationships felt so fake. Even Elio and Oliver. I'm sorry but there was none of the chemistry and blossoming romance that we got from the first book. This is probably due to the lack of actual writing about them at all.
A lot of the men seem to objectify women or men throughout this book. Samuel sees Miranda once and starts fantasizing rather creepily about her. I was very worried for some of these peoples' mindsets.
ALSO I almost forgot. WHAT HAPPENED WITH LEON? Someone please explain to me why this was important and why it happened to be included in the book for a solid 4823482034 pages. A musical mystery that was solved but for what? Who actually cares about Michel's father??
And what happened to Oliver's wife and kids? Were they not heartbroken when he left them to go see Elio? Were they not confused or sad or angry or ANYTHING?
I honestly wish I hadn't ruined it for myself by reading this book because now I know that we never fully got the closure that Elio and Oliver deserved. I would rather have just imagined what had happened to them after the first book instead.
I read this book because I heard the movie is coming out sometime in the future. If you didn't know, I've been in love with Timothee Chalamet for YEARS (everyone is suddenly in love with him now and my 2017-self is saying "I told you so" to everyone). I want to see how this movie will play out. I've heard it's not really going to be sticking to the book and I truly thank god for that.
I would recommend this book to readers who are looking for a story about love, lost love, past romances, and finding love again. WARNING: if you are looking for a beautiful second Elio-Oliver story, you're in the wrong place, folks. I don't know what to tell ya. Maybe try fanfiction hahaha.
Main Character: Elio, Oliver, Samuel
Sidekick(s): Miranda, Michel, etc
Villain(s): Past love, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book could all happen in real life.
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